World Gone By: A Novel (23 page)

Rico’s feet kicked Sam Daddano’s chair hard enough to lift the man out of it, but he held on to Rico’s wrists.

“Trafficante’s a good earner,” Daddano managed, already a little out of breath.

Marcello looked at Meyer and Meyer said, “I’ve always found him reasonable.”

Marcello said, “Then Trafficante it is.”

Rico’s body voided and the smell of it found the room. He stopped kicking. His arms went limp.

Carl the Bowler kept the bag on for another two minutes just to be sure as Joe watched the other men file out.

When Joe stood to leave the room, he gave the corpse one last look as he gathered up his cigarettes. He waved his hand at the stink that emanated from it.

That’s all you did with your time on this earth, Rico—you soiled the air.

And fucked with the wrong Irishman.

DRIVING TO AN APARTMENT he kept in the Old City, Joe considered his options.

He came up with two:

Kill Dion, his oldest friend.

Or don’t kill him and die.

Even if he did kill Dion, the Commission could still vote to kill Joe. He’d cost them money and he’d left a big mess behind. Just because he walked off that boat didn’t mean he was safe.

His driver, Manuel Gravante, said, “Boss, Angel drove by while you were on the boat, told me there’s another package back at the place for you.”

“What package?”

“Angel said it was a box.” Manuel held his hands about a foot apart and then put them back on the wheel. “Said it was sent to the palace in your name. The Colonel’s men brought it over.”

“Who sent it?”

“Somebody named Dix.”

One of his last acts aboveground apparently.

Christ, Joe thought. When all this is over, will any of us be left?

EVEN THOUGH HE’D BEEN EXPECTING THE PACKAGE, he still opened it in the courtyard behind his apartment building just in case. If Joe did, as many suspected, have nine lives, he lost two when he opened the flaps on the box and the smoke poured out. He jumped back, stood there with fresh sweat running into a suit that had already been sweated through, as the white vapor poured off the dry ice and over the flaps and dissipated into the palm fronds above him. Once he’d ascertained that the source was, in fact, dry ice, he waited until the last of the vapors had cleared, then reached in and lifted the smaller box out of the package and placed it on the stone table.

It was dented on all four corners. Oily stains on one side of the cardboard where the contents had rested. Spots of blood speckled the words on top:
CHINETTI BAKERY
,
CENTRO YBOR
. The twine still crisscrossed the carton, and Joe cut it with the same pair of scissors he’d used to open the shipping box. Inside was the
torta al cappuccino,
although you could barely recognize it as such. It was collapsed and green with mold on one side. It reeked.

Every week for the past two years, rain or shine, hot and humid or cold and rainy, Dion had gone to the bakery and walked back out with a cardboard box with a cake inside.

But was that all that had been inside?

Joe lifted the ruined pastry.

All that lay below it was soiled wax paper and a circular piece of cardboard. He’d been wrong. He could feel his heart still pounding
in his chest while all around it a warm river of relief flooded his body. His suspicions shamed him now. He looked up at the window of the bedroom where Dion had stayed the first night before Meyer confirmed that Rico was sending hitters over from Tampa. They’d moved Dion that morning, had him tucked away under the Colonel’s care and the Colonel’s guards about thirty miles south, which was running Joe a pretty penny.

Joe sent a silent apology to his friend.

Then he turned back to the cake box and listened to the darkest part of his heart. He reached in and lifted the wax paper out and then the cardboard circle.

And there it was.

An envelope.

He opened it. He shuffled through the small stack of hundred-dollar bills inside and then found the slip of white paper at the end of the stack. He read what was on it—one name, nothing more. But then there didn’t have to be. The content of the note was irrelevant. The note itself told the whole story.

Every week for the past two years, Dion had gone to Chinetti’s Bakery on Seventh to eat his fill of pastry and get his marching orders from either a Fed or a cop as to which of his guys he was going to rat out next.

Joe folded the note and placed it in his wallet and then put the cardboard, the wax paper, and the cake back in the carton. He closed the carton and took a seat by his rosebushes and the knowledge that he was alone in this business—truly fucking alone—threatened to knock him off his chair. So he stood and he buried his sorrow and buried his fury in a fresh pocket of himself. At thirty-six, after twenty years on the wrong side of the law, he had a lot of those pockets. They were sealed and stored all over his interior. He wondered if they’d ever burst all at once and that’s what would kill him.
Either that or he’d run out of space for them and choke from the lack of air.

HE FELL ASLEEP IN HIS STUDY, sitting upright in the big leather armchair. In the middle of the night he opened his eyes, and the boy stood by the fireplace, the fire mostly embers behind him. He wore red pajamas similar to a pair Joe had worn as a child.

“Is that it?” Joe asked. “You my twin who died in the womb? Or are you me?”

The boy crouched and blew on the embers.

“I never heard of someone having a ghost of himself,” Joe said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

The boy looked back over his shoulder at Joe, as if to say,
Anything’s possible
.

In the shadows of the room, there were others. Joe could feel them, even if he couldn’t see them.

When he looked at the fireplace again, the embers were out and it was already dawn.

THE HOUSE WHERE HE’D STASHED Dion and Tomas was in Nazareno, smack in the center of the interior of Habana Province. Behind it lay Havana and the Atlantic, beyond it were mountains, jungles, and then the sparkle of the Caribbean. It was deep in sugarcane country, which is how Joe had discovered it. The house had been originally built as the estate of the Spanish
commandante
who’d headed the army brought in to crush a rebellion by the Cuban field hands back in the 1880s. The barracks of the soldiers who’d done the crushing had long since been abandoned and retaken by the jungle, but the
commandante
’s estate remained
in its original state of glory—eight bedrooms, fourteen balconies, high iron fences and gates surrounding it.

El Presidente
himself—Colonel Fulgencio Batista—had provided Joe with twelve soldiers, enough to repel any attack from Rico DiGiacomo and his men, should they have discovered the location. But Joe knew the real danger wouldn’t have come from Rico, even if he had survived his trip to the boat. It would come from Meyer. And not from the outside, but from one of the well-armed soldiers already inside.

He found Tomas and Dion in Dion’s bedroom. Dion was teaching the boy chess, a game Dion himself was barely adequate at, but at least he knew the rules. Joe placed the paper shopping bag down on the floor. In his other hand, he carried the medicine bag Dr. Blake had given him in Ybor. He kept it in his hand as he stood in the doorway and watched them for a while, Dion telling Tomas all about the origins of the European conflict. He told him about the anger over Versailles, about Mussolini invading Ethiopia, about the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia.

“That’s where his shit should have been stopped,” Dion said. “Once you tell a man it’s okay to steal, he won’t stop until you cut off his hand. But if you threaten to cut off his hand before he reaches for that piece of bread, and he sees in your eyes that you’re serious? He’ll figure out how to get by on less.”

“Will we lose?” Tomas asked.

“Lose what?” Dion said. “We don’t own real estate in France.”

“But then why’re we fighting?”

“Well, we’re fighting the Japs because they attacked us. And Hitler, little Kraut bastard, kept going after our ships, but the real reason we’re fighting is because he’s just nuts and he’s gotta go.”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much. Sometimes, a guy’s just gotta go.”

“Why’re the Japanese mad at us?”

Dion opened his mouth to answer, then closed it. After a minute, he said, “You know, I don’t even know. I mean they’re Japs, so they’re not like you or me, but I don’t know why their panties got in a bunch originally. Want me to look into it?”

Tomas nodded.

“Deal. By our next game, I’ll know all there is worth knowing about Japs and their sneaky ways.”

Tomas laughed and said, “Checkmate.”

“Sneak attack, uh?” Dion looked down at the board. “You might be half Jap yourself.”

Tomas looked back at Joe. “I won, Father.”

“I see that. Well done.”

Tomas got off the bed. “Are we leaving here soon?”

Joe nodded. “Soon, yeah. Can you go wash up? I think Mrs. Alavarez is making you lunch downstairs.”

“Okay. See you, Uncle Dion.”

“See ya.”

“Checkmate,” Tomas said as he was leaving. “Ha.”

Joe placed the shopping bag near the foot of the bed and the doctor’s satchel on the nightstand. He removed the chessboard from Dion’s thighs. “How you feeling?”

“Better every day. Still weak, you know, but getting there. I got a list of guys I think we can trust. Some are in Tampa, but a lot of them are guys from our Boston operation. If you could get up there, convince them to get down to Tampa in a month, maybe six weeks, we could take the town back. Some of these guys are going to be expensive. You know, like Kevin Byrne ain’t picking up his eight kids and leaving his empire there in Mattapan out of pure loyalty. We’ll have to pay him boxcar numbers. And Mickey Adams, he ain’t going to be cheap either, but if they say yes, their word is gold.
And if they say no, they’ll never tell anyone you were ever in town. Guys like that are—”

Joe placed the chessboard on top of the dresser. “I had a meeting yesterday with Meyer, Carlos, and Sammy Turnips.”

Dion resettled his head against the pillows. “You did, uh?”

“Yup.”

“And how’d that go?”

“I’m still breathing.”

Dion snorted. “They wouldn’t have clipped you.”

“Actually,” Joe said and sat on the side of the bed, “they had the burial spot all picked out. I was floating above it for a good hour.”

“You met on a
boat
? What are you, insane?”

“I didn’t have a choice. The Commission says come, you better well come. If I hadn’t, they’d have clipped us all by now.”

“Get past
those
guards out there? I don’t think so.”

“Those are Batista’s guards. Batista takes money from me and he takes it from Meyer. That means if there’s a beef between the two of us, he’ll take the biggest cut from whoever gets it to him first and let the gods sort it out. Nobody has to get through these guards. It would be the guards who’d kill us.”

Dion shifted some more in the bed and pulled half a cigar out of his ashtray and relit it. “So you met with the Commission.”

“And Rico DiGiacomo.”

Dion’s eyes rose around the cigar smoke as the flame finally caught and the tobacco cackled. “He’s a little irate about his brother, I’d guess.”

“That’s a mild way of putting it. He came in wanting my head.”

“How’d you leave with it then?”

“I promised them yours.”

Dion shifted in the bed again, and Joe realized he was trying to get a look in the bag. “You promised them mine.”

Joe nodded.

“Why would you do that, Joe?”

“Only way I walked back off the boat.”

“What’s in the bag, Joe?”

“They made it clear to me that the hit on you wasn’t something Rico just thought up and did. It was sanctioned.”

Dion sat with that for a while, his eyes gone small and inward, his face pale. He continued to puff on his cigar, but Joe wondered if he was even aware of it. After about five minutes had passed, he said, “I know revenue’s been declining the last couple years on my watch. I know I play the horses too much, but . . .” He fell silent again, took a few more puffs on the cigar to keep the coal hot. “They say why they want me cooked?”

“No. But I got a few theories.” Joe reached into the bag and pulled out the box from Chinetti’s. He placed it on Dion’s lap and watched his friend’s face drain.

Dion said, “What’s that?”

Joe chuckled.

Dion said it again. “What’s that? That from Chinetti’s?”

Joe reached into Dr. Blake’s bag, removed a full syringe of morphine. Enough to dope a herd of giraffe. He tapped it against the heel of his hand and considered his oldest friend.

“Dirty box,” Dion said. “Got blood all over it.”

“It’s dirty,” Joe agreed. “What’d they have on you?”

“Look, I don’t know what you—”

“What’d they have?” Joe tapped the syringe off Dion’s chest.

“Hey, Joe, I know it looks like one thing.”

“Because it is.”

“But sometimes things aren’t what they seem.”

Joe tapped the syringe down Dion’s leg.
Tap tap tap
. “Most times they are, though.”

“Joe, we’re brothers. You’re not going—”

Joe placed the point of the needle against Dion’s throat. He didn’t do it with any sort of flourish—one second the syringe was tapping against Dion’s shin, the next the point was pressed against the artery just to the left of his Adam’s apple. “You betrayed me once before. I spent three years in prison because of it. And not just any prison—Charlestown. And still I stood by you. Second time I had this choice given to me, they killed nine of my guys because I chose not to give you up. Remember Sal? Remember Lefty and Arnaz and Kenwood? Esposito and Parone? They’re all dead because I didn’t turn you over to Maso Pescatore in ’33.” He scratched the needle point down Dion’s throat and then back up the other side. “Now, here comes the choice again. Except I got a son now, D.” He tipped the point of the needle into the skin and placed his thumb on the plunger and kept his voice steady. “So why don’t you fucking tell me what the Feds have on you?”

Dion gave up trying to see the needle and looked into Joe’s face. “What do they always have on guys like us? Proof. They had me on the phone ordering a knee-capping of that turd in Pinellas last year. Had pictures of me when we off-loaded that boat you sent from Havana back in ’41.”

“You went to an off-load? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I got sloppy. I was bored.”

It was all Joe could do not to plunge the needle into his fucking eye.

“Who made contact?”

“He worked for Anslinger.”

The Bureau of Narcotics, under the zealot Harry Anslinger, was the only law enforcement group out there that could tell the difference between its ass and a hat. And there had long been a suspicion
that this could be due to Anslinger having someone feeding him information from the inside.